Wednesday, June 20, 2018

For a long while now, my so-called “reviews” of film and TV have been limited to spontaneous postings on my Facebook page, while those of books have been posted to my Goodreads library. While not full reviews in any sense of the word, occasionally I have typed something in those forums that succeeds in expressing what I felt about the subject. Even rarely, I type something that’s worth salvaging. Here, in no particular order, are some of those mini-reviews, although cleaned up a mite and hopefully improved to a point where someone might find them mildly useful, or suggestive of something, goodness knows what. There’ll be more of this sort of rubbish over the next few weeks.

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In the sharply divided “love it or hate it” camps, which are largely but not exclusively defined by generation, put me down on the “hate” side for STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI.

Wow. Where do I begin to sort out this monumental heap of stinking rubbish?
One has to hand it to director / screenwriter Rian Johnson, for it is No Mean Feat to make JJ Abrams look good by comparison. Perhaps that was why he was chosen to handle this Middle Chapter.

But here’s the thing: I’ve re-watched (or tried to) a bunch of them in recent months, and it has to be said that there have only ever been two good STAR WARS movies, three if you’re generous and count ROGUE ONE. So after all, it’s no surprise to rack up another stinker. What is a little bit surprising is that neither George Lucas nor the new team at Disney ever seem to learn from their mistakes. Especially with the new team, it’s not just that they have no real talent and are incapable of creating anything original: they have no BRAINS and are incapable of even creating a reasonable COPY.

Like much of what has gone before it, THE LAST JEDI is long and ponderous and boring and stupid and a painful waste of time.

I was there for the first STAR WARS. I will always remember its fun, its excitement, and most of all, its light-heartedness. It wasn’t trying to sell you anything, and it never took itself seriously. It was George Lucas’s homage to the great Saturday matinee serials, and nothing more. It was cotton candy. It lifted our hearts with its simplicity and sweetness.

That all changed with RETURN OF THE JEDI. By then, George Lucas had stuck his head so far up Joseph Campbell’s asshole that the only thing he could see was his own ego. He made the fatal mistake of taking himself seriously, and STAR WARS has never been the same since.

The Disney Company have spent millions and millions of dollars to create this zombie simulacrum that looks uncannily like one would expect STAR WARS to look like all these years later — but it has no soul, and worse than that, it has no heart.

As a side note: it’s obvious that Carrie Fisher was a sick woman when she filmed this. She looks fully ten years older than she actually was at the time of her death.

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One doesn't exactly *enjoy* Ingmar Bergman's SAWDUST AND TINSEL (1953), unless one takes a perverse and sadistic joy in observing the very personal sufferings of Circus Folk. But there's no denying the exquisite beauty in its shabbiness, nor the way that it makes you feel the many levels of humiliation its characters experience. It's my second-favorite Bergman movie, after THE MAGICIAN.

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It seems churlish to criticize a movie with so noble a cause as its subject, but SUFFRAGETTE wears its purple heart on its sleeve with a fringe of malice and force-fed righteousness. It is well beyond manipulative in the style fostered by Spielberg: not for nothing did they choose Carey Mulligan (whose innate qualities of sympathy made her such a vital part of “Blink,” one of the modern Doctor Who’s finest episodes), to endure in composite form all of the worst things that were collectively endured by the members of the movement. You expect to get the obligatory force-feeding scene and they do not "disappoint," playing it with spectacular ugliness. But it’s hard to trust anything in which all the women are presented as saints and all the men (barring one token character) as sinners. The film’s production design is so evocative as to make a viewer feel they have jumped back in time, but it's squandered by an incompetent director who drowns the picture in herky-jerky close-ups made with a deliberately shaky hand-held camera, trying to force either a sense of urgency or an upset stomach; it’s hard to say which. It's not a movie at all, but a polemic, and a cowardly one at that: for there are signs in place that point towards a much stronger ending that seems to have been sanitized for the sake of leaving the audience "feeling good." If that’s true, SUFFRAGETTE doesn't even have the courage of its own convictions.

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What a marvelous pirate Walter Matthau would have made. Unfortunately, he chose to play one in Roman Polanski’s PIRATES, an insufferable display of one vulgar gross-out joke after another played out on one of the most beautiful set-pieces ever built for a movie. This set-piece is the pirate ship itself: and because it is beautiful Polanski does everything he can to avoid letting us get a good look at the thing, choosing instead to focus on Matthau’s one-legged double stumping around in feces and vomit and ultimately killing a live rat on screen, in close up, by stomping it with his peg leg. This is where I gave up. Sometimes, the nicest thing about movies in digital format is that you can simply throw the bad ones in the trash, where they belong, and purge your computer of their bits and bytes forever and ever.

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For many and many a year I have wanted to see Cooper & Shoedsack's THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME, made in 1933 and shot on the same jungle sets and at the same time as their original classic, KING KONG. But time and movie rights were not kind to this film: for decades, the only available versions were lousy public-domain prints and computer-colored versions. Thank goodness the Mostly Good folks at The Critereon Collection have given it the release it deserves, beautifully restored in high-def and looking as if it could have been filmed yesterday, if only the people and the styles disn’t look so alien to the world we find ourselves stranded in today.

It is a very minor masterpiece, not a horror movie despite some undeniably horrific moments, but a delightful example of film noir that sometimes strays outside the tight boundaries of the genre into plain adventure. Everything about it is pitch-perfect. It is short, exciting, thrilling and frightening. The supposed insights into human nature are not very profound, but the picture accomplishes everything that it sets out to do -- and oh, that Fay Wray!

Tuesday, June 19, 2018

In the unlikely event that you've been wondering why I haven't been posting all that much in recent months, the best answer I can give you is: well, you know.

2018 hasn't been a particularly easy year almost from the outset. On Valentine's Day, my 91-year-old father shot himself to death, apparently (I have to go by what I'm told, folks), in a fit of pique over the thought the would have to start using a walker. To which I can only roll my eyes and say "Oh, poor BABY!" My grief was drowned under a wave of anger and confusion and anger and distance and anger and, oh yeah, anger. I had just talked to him the day before and he sounded fine. He was going in to the hospital the next day for tests to see if the treatments he had been undergoing for cancer had had a significant impact. He went through with the tests; but as far as I know he didn't wait for the results.

Throughout the rest of February and into March, the Kickstarter campaign for my latest big Tarot project was dogged by a dedicated series of personal attacks from a small but vocal group of folk who don't like one of the decks that I publish. I'm not going to write here about the issues that they raised against me, in part because I've said my piece at the website for the deck, but also because I think it's beside the point. I think that the attackers have the right to their (uninformed and misguided) opinions, and I believe they absolutely have the right to decide for themselves whether or not the deck is something they'd want in their house. But they don't have the right to make that decision for other people, and they certainly don't have the right to act as the Supreme Arbiter of What Can and Cannot Be Published in this wild and many-faceted multicultural world in which we live. They don't have the right to act as the Great Censor for All Humankind. And they don't have the right to attack me and make my life a living hell over the damn thing.

Anyway, That Furore has died down to a dull roar, and with any luck at all the paragraph that I just typed won't dredge it up again. It's not meant to do that ... but this pile of steaming crap falling on me in the weeks immediately following my Dad's death did not make life any god damn easier.

Just when things were starting to look up, June hit: and June has been a notable shitstorm. I won't bother you with the details: lots of other folks out there have things significantly worse than I do. For one thing, as the problems have cropped up, I have been able to get the solutions in place, if not in progress.

In in the end, it all reminds me of why I don't do this anymore: I started this blog as a form of self-therapy to get me through a significant Dark Period of my life, at a time when I had no other form of self-therapy other than alcohol and nothing good in life that I could point to to keep me going. Eight years later, all that has changed. I'm not drinking anymore, and in the place of the gaping hole that used to be my life I have a lot of exciting and fun and interesting and fulfilling projects that are keeping me going just fine. I got out of the crap job that was killing me and now I work for myself, and for the most part a lot of the work that I am doing is stuff that people seem to like.

That makes me pretty god-damn fortunate. "Privileged," to use an old word in the modern vernacular. And so if 2017 has been a shitstorm that has slowed me down or set me back, still it hasn't buried me yet, and I am working to make 2018 better.

I still hope to publish film, book, TV and pop-cultural reviews and suchlike on this blog, and have a long post on those lines coming along here any minute now, but the kind of self-confessional winging that you've just been subject to and which was the main business of this blog for a considerable bunch of time: that's going away, hopefully forever: because although Life never gets any easier, I've learned that you can do things that allow you to change how you face it.

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